Friday, 30 March 2012

AUTHOR’S NOTE: When I say ‘XI thoughts on Galle’, I don’t mean on the city per se,
although I’m sure it’s lovely. I’m merely using Galle as a synecdoche: a large
thing that stands in for a smaller thing that is the actual referent of the word
or phrase, as for instance when newsreaders say “Washington” or “Moscow” when
they mean the US or Russian government. OK? OK. Here are my thoughts. They are
a VERDICT. Nail them to the inside of your eyelids, scum.

1.Sri Lanka
used to be called Ceylon,
after the tea producers. Before that, however, it
was known (to Europeans, at least) as Serendip, whence comes the word ‘serendipity’: the art of chancing
across beautiful things (the cornerstone of creativity and innovation according to Steven
Johnson’s excellent Where
Good Ideas Come From). Well, all I can say is, let’s hope that the England top
order chance across the art of not throwing your wicket away through poor
concentration in a manner that would shame the fucking X-Box gen– … Erm, sorry about
that. I saw some lovely, fluffy clouds outside… I didn’t really, you goon; I
was doing satire. Yeah, anyway, England need to
stumble across the art of stumbling across a way of making enough runs
for their bowlers to work with. Now-ish will do.

2.Talking of Sri Lanka and names, there’s a very important
debate that needs to be had, and that debate is this: the pronunciation of
which cricketer’s name best captures the sonic essence of Richie
Benaud’s inimitable, though much imitated voice, and thereby the basis of his laconic
commentary style as a whole? Eh? Some say it’s “Muttiah Muralidaran,” with a
hard ‘d’ (as opposed to “Muralitharan” with stress on the middle syllable [for
everyone in the world except Tony Greig] or the penultimate [for Tony
Greig]). Some even claim it’s “Kapila Wijegunawardene,” which sounds to me like
an invitation to eat. Personally, I think the name that best captures Benaud’s soft and rhythmical vowel-fondling ululations has to be “Mahendra Nagamootoo”. What you saying?

The debate could be extended to other sports, too. It took a long
while for the BBC to recognize that received pronunciation did not encompass
the majority of its audience, and that deploying a regional accent on its
airwaves was not a hanging offence. And thus came the luscious-voiced likes of Brendan
Foster, whose Rehrzer Mert-ah (Rosa
Mota) is surely the name that best exemplifies his Geordie tones.

And then there’s rugby, and the great Bill McClaren. So
hydraulic was his enunciation, so many moving parts concerted, such a range of twangs
and grumbles, a whole glottal gymnastics, that one could easily imagine him
blowing or even vibrating the cutlery
clean off your dinner table during the evocation of a particularly memorable
passage of play – maybe a garryowen starting
off a magnificent sweeping counter-attacking try, ball passed through the hands
of all 15 players before being touched joyously down between the posts. A mention in dispatches should go to Eddie Butler for his
beautiful enunciation of the French players’ names – Dussautoir, Rougerie,
Poitrenaud; even those with Basque, Vietnamese or West African heritage, like
Harinorduquy, Trinh-Duc, or Nyanga – hitting all the diphthongs and nasalised
vowels like a master pianist.

But McLaren’s Lagavullin-steeped Highland burr evokes perfectly the
cold and windswept context in which rugby union really ought to be played, and
the quintessential name to exemplify his voice – his brrr – would have to be that of
ex-England flanker Peter Winterbottom. Go on, say it: Peet-turrh Wahn-turrh-boar-tumm. Now say it again, but louder. And
again, faster. Go on! Go ooooon. And once more. Say it like Bill McClaren would say it... And now you’re laughing, aren’t you? Tittering inanely. Fun, isn’t it? Thanks,
that’ll be £5 you owe me.

3.Talking of names, the United Nations Council for the
Protection of Finite Resources has decreed that, as of 2015, Sri Lanka will
have to cut down on the number of polysyllabic players in their side because of
the amount of ink it’s forcing Western newspapers to get through. Thus, the
likes of Paranavitana, Kaluwitharana, Kalavitagoda, Bandaratilleke,
Wijegunawardene, Samarasekera, Kuruppuarachchi, and Jayaprakashdaran will all
have to be sacrificed for the sake of the likes of Vaas, Silva, Dias, John
(yes, look it up), Silva, Zoysa, Silva, Randiv and Silva.

Randiv: a secret lemonade drinker?

4. Talking of Randiv, old Suraj nipped in with a cheeky
4-fer in the second innings, adding three tailend wickets and KP to the couple
he took in the first innings. Well bowled, I guess. But did anyone else spot
the quirkiness of his run-up: it’s like someone trying to sneak up behind you
by tiptoeing across a very creaky old wooden floor, the noisy parts of which he
knows very well (is he a secret lemonade drinker?). Precise, jerky, awkward, angular.

5.Talking of angular, does anyone else think that Lankan
paceman Suranga Lakmal bears a certain resemblance to the actress Sandra
Bernhardt, who played the stalking accomplice of De Niro’s unhinged Rupert
Pupkin in Scorcese’s underrated classic The
King of Comedy? He does, kinda – but you need to know how to look…

Suranga Lakmal's twin sister?

6.Talking of being unhinged, the Sri Lankan Cricket Board’s
opportunistic ticket-pricing policy – effectively setting up a dual economy:
one price for locals, one (exorbitant) for Brits – even extended on the fourth
day to fleecing people who tried to watch the game on the cheap from the
ramparts of the old Dutch fort, ostensibly because some local nabob had hired
out the place for a party. You wouldn’t think they’d have the gall. It seems to
me to be short-termist in the extreme to dole out punitive charges to the one
nation that consistently brings a large contingent of supporters overseas. One
can only hope that the profits are being used to persuade Lasith Malinga to
return to Test cricket, as I have a feeling he might prove more than a bit
useful on some of the flatter pitches out there.

7.Anyway, talking of having some gall, Galle is undoubtedly a beautiful setting, but
is it the most impressive cricket ground in the shadow of an old fortified
stronghold? Players at Bamburgh CC might beg to differ…

8.Talking of the old Dutch fort, it is perhaps not all that
widely known that the men of the Netherlands established a trading colony on
the island – following 97 years after the Portuguese, of course (think of all
those Fernandos) – a staging post en route to Java, no doubt, for the
quasi-governmental proto-megacorporation, the Dutch East India Company. Anyway,
the Dutch legacy lives on today in the tradition of the Burghers, patrilineal
descendents of the Dutch (principally though not exclusively), who have a
first-class cricket side named in their honour and whose latest international
representative was Michael
Vandort.

Anyway, I mention all this because it struck me that Holland are missing a bit
of a trick as far as strengthening their national cricket team is concerned.
What with their colonial past in South Africa,
too – not to mention Tasmania,
once known as Van
Dieman’s Land, after the U2 track (is Dirk Nannes from down there?) – there
are not only a whole host of not-quite-good-enough-for-the-national-team
Saffers they could pick up (all due apologies to Ryan ten Doeschate), thus
competing with us (all due apologies to KP and Trott), but probably a few
Lankans who could trace back their ancestry to the motherland. While they’re at
it, they could smuggle some Guyanese over the border into Suriname
(possibly making them eligible, although this involving too many layers of
immigration red tape for me to work out right now); or Trinidadians onto the
Dutch Antilles. What’s the point of colonialism if you have to give up the
cheap flow of important resources?

Strauss: professional trudger, down but not RAUS

9.Anyway, talking of Teutonic interest in cricket, German
tabloid Bild is in no doubt where the
blame for England’s
current subcontinental woes lies, yesterday running its leader beneath the (faintly
anti-Semitic) headline STRAUSS RAUS. However, to people – German-speaking or
otherwise – who think that a sole hundred in 48 innings is proof positive that
he should be dropped, I say this is a slightly misleading stat. It is not,
strictly speaking, ‘all about hundreds’ as it is about match-winning contributions and, to a lesser extent, averages. You
can make lots and lots of 80s and you’ll be doing a good job. “Hundreds win Tests,”
you reply. Again, not necessarily. I would bet that there have been more
hundreds scored in draws than wins – certainly, up to about 1995 (I’d wager). And
then there’s the unquantifiable value of captaincy, of leadership, to a team.
Is Strauss slipping back into the Misbah and Sammy realms of being picked for his
captaincy? Maybe. But he’s earned some breathing space. So back the fuck up.

10.Anyway, talking of headlines, it’s a shame Charlie
Shreck wasn’t selected for this game – instead of James Anderson, say, or Monty –not because
that would have given Notts four of the attack (yes, yes, I know he’s signed
for Kent) but because it would have allowed someone to use the headline CHARLES
DE GALLE. As it is, new West Indies opener Johnson
Charles better sort his shit out so that his career is prolonged to the
point where the headline can eventually be used. Money on that not happening, from the
evidence so far.

De Galle: leadership (albeit high-handed and autocratic)

11. Anyway, talking of a Notts-based bowling attack, I have
a prediction: should Samit Patel’s England career extend beyond the current
tour, to environments other than those in which the need for a fifth (or
fourth-and-a-half) bowling option is best served with a spinner slow
bowler – for instance, with England now having shown themselves happy to have Prior
at six, Bresnan could, in most conditions, come in at seven as a third seamer (or fourth, if they
want to ditch Monty…which could also be true if they want to revert to a
four-man attack) – then reverse sweeper forecasts that the England team will
see a reprisal of the tradition of Notts players going absolutely radge at each
other, last seen in around 2008 with Ryan Sidebottom busting blood vessels at
Monty’s shambolic fielding.

Young Samit [not really - legal team]

My logic is this: Patel is a Notts lad – and, it’s fair to
say, of not entirely solid character (before your scurrilous minds start speculating
unduly, I’m merely thinking of the lack of discipline of his mouth bouncers: “Sorry, cake. You’re not coming in. Not tonight.”) –
while Swann has been with the county since the start of the 2005 season, when Patel was a
mere slip of just out of his teenage years. They know each other reasonably well, I’d guess. Therefore, Swann’ll probably already have seen one or two indiscretions and, I’d hazard, several instances of all and sundry pulling out their hair.
Furthermore, Mr Swann may well be the Fastest Wit in the West (Bridgford area), but he’s
also quite narky on the field, at times. Witness the expression on his face when Samit failed dismally
to be 6' 6" tall so that he could catch Prasanna Jaywardene in the Sri
Lankan second innings, just as they were extending their lead from
‘Maybe, on a very, very good day, and if Herath breaks a finger attempting to
snaffle a drilled return catch, we might knock these off, oooh, I dunno...1 in 4 times,
max’ to ‘We’re absolutely fucked’. Bearing all this in mind, there’s no doubt he’s going to go
mental at Samit soon. Probably in Colombo (according to Columbo).

Monday, 26 March 2012

At the back end of last month it was my great pleasure to
interview three bright-eyed young cricketers in their first year as full-time
professionals, having successfully graduated from the NottsAcademy
at the end of last season, the only three to do so. The trio also represented
England Under 19s in a series against South
Africa in late summer and in Bangladesh January just gone. They
are now out in Australia,
playing a quadrangular tournament against the hosts, India
and New Zealand
as preparation for the World Cup there in August this year.

Over the course of an hour-and-a-half in the Larwood and
Voce, I asked Sam Wood, Brett Hutton (both of Farnsfield CC, near Mansfield) and
Sam Kelsall (who played under my captaincy at Moddershall in 2008) about their
journey as players so far; about what the young cricketer hopes to take from
the game in 2012, a historically unprecedented era dominated by the financial
and technical implications of Twenty20; and what their specific, individual
targets and aspirations were – for this summer, for the duration of their
contracts, for 5 years’ time, 10 years’ time, and for the end of their careers.

The full-length interview can be found in the next issue of
SPIN magazine, out this week (and on sale at WH Smith),* but I also tacked on another mini-interview for LeftLion, the Nottingham magazine and
website of which I’m Sports Editor – frivolous questions about their new
colleagues in the senior squad and the city they now call home – which can be
found on the LeftLion website.

It’s all too easy for the modern cricketer to be media
trained into blandness and/or defensiveness, but I was given lots of
interesting and considered responses. I wish the three of them well for the
summer.

* SPIN can also be ordered from Kim Jones: countycricketkj[at]gmail[dot]com

Saturday, 24 March 2012

The gimlet eyes adjusted to the unremitting glare of the Australian
sunlight (and the global spotlight); crow’s feet, the visible bodily inscription of many hours of unyielding concentration; the metronomic mastication, pausing only
when a foe is to be faced down; a hint of stubble, on which perhaps to scuff a
ball ready to swing Irish. Didn’t give much away, ‘Tugga’ Waugh.

Game face. Although primarily associated with the ice-veined
players of high-stakes poker, the importance of a ‘game face’ is a commonplace
of all professional sports, perhaps all competitive environments. Indeed, there
are some strains of Cultural Studies that claim that in all our everyday social interactions we are in some sense performing
(not for nothing does persona derive
from the Latin for ‘mask’). Of course, such a desolate hypothesis gives the
impression that us latter day homo
sapiens are – from the cradle to the cricket field, nightclub to the negotiating
table – all highly calculating über-pragmatists happy to pin ‘appropriate’ sentiments
to our face according to context, when in fact we know full-well that our authentic,
if unruly, emotions are always threatening to irrupt and overwhelm our self-containment, restraint, and decorum. Just ask Glenn McGrath.

However, it is often assumed that once such fiercely driven
sportsfolk as McGrath and Waugh exit the furnace of top-level competition, the
game face is left there to burn. Suddenly, these predatory creatures are
amiable, approachable, perhaps generous-spirited; where once they crackled with
the energy of a seemingly bottomless ruthlessness and bristled at the slightest
provocation, now they are affable, cordial, gracious even.

WAUGH: "What the fuck are you looking at?"AMBROSE: "Don't cuss me, man"WAUGH: "Why don't you go and get fucked"

For cricket lovers of a certain age, Steve Waugh was just
about the most hard-nosed and remorseless competitor of his era: giving it,
taking it, never shirking it, always meeting obstacles head on. There were
those piercing, gunslinger’s eyes, which were either fixated on the source of
danger or, from gully – the quintessential lone ranger’s position, off at the
edge of the pack yet where the bullets fly fastest – boring into some fresh
quarry. From a distance, the arch gum-chewer remained a largely taciturn presence
on the field, words seemingly redundant when you are already irradiating such
menace. This silence was but a fragile accord, though, and when his mouth
opened it seemed to carry nuclear-level threat. At times, he seemed to be
affectless, the reptilian brain of our hominid ancestors writ large, batting
with lizard stillness and sporadic celerity, motionless until a sinuous snap
took his body into a ball with width, either flaying cuts or dropping
concrete-heavy hands on a square drive. Unfussy. Insatiable. Always happy to
keep you on the wrack. Finally, there was that jaunty, ten-to-two gait and swinging
shoulders that simply refused to sag, even when carrying his team through a
tough day on tough pitches against the toughest of bowlers, giant bowlers who
he would stare down, swear down, and more often than not wear down. The
granite-hewn legend is well known.

However, Waugh is also – and always was, of course – a
bright, articulate and open-minded soul, not only intensely aware of the
traditions of his own culture but a pioneer in dragging the game forward,
keeping it in step with (and sometimes a pace or two in front of) the changing
desires of the audience. Most impressively, he used the wealth and fame that
cricket has bestowed upon him to channel enormous quantities of financial and
emotional assistance to the impoverished people of India (in particular, the Udayan
leper colony in Kolkata). Here was a Baggy Green-revering citizen of the world;
a humanist and humanitarian whose charitable impulses are blind to, and
overflowed, national borders, nestling where need was greatest.

So it was that at the Trent Bridge library recently, I
opened Waugh’s autobiography, Out of my
Comfort Zone,expecting to see
the gnarled Aussie warrior to have mellowed sufficiently to be able to express
a certain amount of sympathy and suppressed admiration for English cricket,
sentiments he was constitutionally unable to show while still competing against
an opponent over whom his country lorded for all but the first series of a
nineteen-year Test career (one that took in eight Ashes campaigns), a dominance
in which he was as prominent as any of England’s other tormentors – be that
Warne, McGrath, Gilchrist or whomever.

Research took me to the Index, and there it was: the main
entry for ‘English Cricket’, with a total of 14 sub-entries that, read as a list,
provided an interesting…well, index of
Tugga’s longstanding basic outlook on the old foe. Yes, there’s the caveat that
this view is of only those sides that he faced, the calamitous, revolving-door
years, and not ‘English cricket’ construed as some entity with permanent
characteristics. There’s also the very real possibility that the indexing was
not the work of his own hand. Even so, these 14 sub-headings are a gorgeous
snapshot of an era of Aussie hegemony – perhaps contempt – from which England
supporters will feel glad to have awoken, a summation in miniature of our
myriad failings and the abject futility of our desperate hopes at the time that we might, might... They are a
bullet-point bullet-proof indictment of why we didn’t have a prayer.

Readers of Out of my
Comfort Zone wishing to investigate S.R. Waugh’s views on ‘English Cricket,
157’ could therefore have looked under the following headings, listed
alphabetically:

English cricket, 157

Australian stranglehold begins,
273, 274

caught between youth and
experience, 3

damned in the press, 114, 209,
609

‘dead rubber’ syndrome, 472

familiarity through county
matches, 193

fear of Australia, 599

lack of self-belief, 496

lack of total commitment, 206,
207

local negativity, 609

no fun, 282, 283

poor fielding, 496

search for a captain, 609

volatile crowds, 600

weakness against spin, 497

In the same way that Waugh’s charitable works have transcended local, parochial
concerns, I hoped my nationality would not overheat the passions and thus occlude the genuine tug of admiration I felt for this most cussed of cricketers, one who, from the moment
he took guard – before, in fact – never, ever let his guard drop. Truly, the
most formidable game face of them all.

Monday, 19 March 2012

The fear of change. At one time or another, it afflicts us
all. Imperceptibly, the audacity of youth becomes the trepidation of
middle-age, only willpower preventing our curiosity from congealing into
timorous conservatism and an future spent beating psychological retreat from
the ominous shadows and the unlocalizable noises, withdrawing, defensive, into
creasebound shotlessness and the perverse comfort of its at-least stable apprehensions.

Cricket and conservatism are familiar bedfellows.
Notwithstanding the superficially radical trappings of Twenty20 – its
off-the-peg razzmatazz a ‘meme’
replicated worldwide and thus already an establishment of sorts – cricket, at
the administrative level, is a culture disinclined to change (not off its own
bat, anyway). Ask cricket supporters anywhere in the world to conjure forth an
image of the sport’s establishment and chances are they’ll still picture the
MCC members at Lord’s, the jowly, patrician personification of fusty
traditionalism.

ruling class

While this traditional view of traditionalism is itself
perhaps now something of an archaism given India’s rise, it remains important
to enquire whether such conservatism is institutional – part of the territory
of the game’s elite, as it were, intrinsic to the game’s decision-makers across
cultures and ages – or confined to an English old guard trapped in the
post-Imperial aspic, fearfully trying to control and check an environment that
just won’t sit still. Are all boards averse to change, for the simple reason
that genuine innovation always threatens to pull the rug from under their feet?
Most pertinently, is the BCCI – de facto
leader of the global game – really a bastion of trenchant conservatism? Judging
by its steadfast refusal to adopt the Umpire Decision Review System (DRS), the
answer would seem to be affirmative; then again, it has been in the vanguard in
embracing the all-singing, all-dancing, Brave New World of Twenty20. So, which
is it: revolutionary or reactionary?

cricketing arms race

Before trying to answer these questions, it is absolutely crucial
to bear a couple of things in mind regarding the concept of evolution, be that
cultural or natural. First, not all innovations are necessarily advancements, nor are they inevitable –
things might have always happened differently, or not at all. There is no master
plan. Second, despite popular misconceptions around Darwin’s notion of the “survival of the
fittest” – in which evolution was seen as a process of adaptation leading to
“optimal design” – neither biological nor cultural processes are governed by linear progress on an ascending line of
improvement. Both are undirected, just as liable to stand still or go backwards
as improve. When looking at the events and processes that move cultures and
species along, these nonlinear dynamics
can be seen in such phenomena as “arms races” that lock adversaries into
mutually reinforcing, tit-for-tat paths of development in which advances on one
side of a relation stimulate advances on the other, creating the snowball
effect of ‘positive feedback’: ever-sharper fangs create ever-harder armour; a
dilscoop leads to a slower-ball bouncer… But the key point – and the one that
matters in relation to T20 and DRS – is that these advances may be suboptimal
in relation to other selection pressures, other components in the ‘adaptive
landscape’: for instance, a bird’s bright plumage might attract mates (advantage)
but it may also reduce camouflage (disadvantage). In sum, whether one is
talking about skill-sets for the competitive environments of sport, society, or
nature, there is no fittest design at
the end-point of linear evolution, because the criteria for optimality are
changing in step with the dynamics. This is abundantly clear in the accelerated
‘evolution’ of societies, with the continual obsolescence of carefully acquired
skills and the constant need to re-train sectors of the workforce.

Returning to cricket, then, the BCCI’s tight embrace of the
Twenty20 golden goose is merely a line of
development, not ‘progress’ per se. Perhaps the MCC and Test cricket are to
feudalism as the BCCI and T20 are to capitalism, for in all ages the emergence
of a new ruling class comes from seeing and harnessing the cutting edges of
wealth and power that will submerge the old order. Simplifying a little, capitalist
power is increasingly a matter of brute quantities and the BCCI is duly erecting
its dominance upon India’s gigantic population and the depth of its affection
for cricket, exploiting the huge domestic revenues from the economic boom
(boom) created by this made-for-TV spectacle, and in so doing submerging the
old order, yet all the while stabilizing and taming the revolutionary force of
these flows that achieved the dominance in the first place.

BCCI executives consider DRS

the ostrich must
evolve

It is too early to tell whether the shift in cricket’s
geopolitical centre of gravity will lead to the slow withering of Test cricket,
but the problem in this regard has less to do with the quantity of T20 being
played as it does a (perhaps connected) general depreciation of Test cricket –
certainly not something the BCCI deliberately sought out, but, all the same, a
side-effect of their and Lalit Modi’s (inescapably semi-blind) behaviour in
cricket’s ‘adaptive landscape’. There is still widespread bewilderment that the
BCCI have been so obstinately anti-modern in their stance on DRS, particularly
when its introduction was provoked, in large part, by umpiring
mistakes in the infamous and contentious Sydney Test of 2008 that cost India
(cost in the old currency of
prestige, not the new one of currency). It is even more perplexing given that
neither of the two most obvious ostensible reasons really stand up to scrutiny.

Firstly, their misgivings about the accuracy of
ball-tracking technology (Hawk-Eye or Virtual Eye alike) are either a simple
smokescreen concealing a powerful lobby within the team, or, more likely, a
sincerely held yet tenuous and barely plausible stance, one that’s causing them
to play a good way down the wrong line, as it were. As with evolution, DRS, at
present, need not be ‘perfect’, a fittest design. It is merely a resource. Basing
your opposition to DRS on the fact that it isn’t foolproof is akin to sticking
to a homeopathic potion because the $10 billion medical facility up the road
doesn’t cure 100 per cent of patients.

Anyway, despite the alarmists’ caricature, the umpires are
not obliged to devolve agency wholesale
to the technology. In cases in which the video evidence is drastically
contradicted by the virtual reconstruction of Hawk-Eye – generally off the
bowling of spinners when there is little distance between ball pitching and
striking the pad (as happened with Phillip
Hughes in Sri Lanka last August) – surely they can, as arbiters, choose to
rely on a combination of their eyesight and the camera. And if Hawk-Eye does have a blind spot, then at the very
least a TV replay helps umpires decide where the ball pitched: not perfect; an
improvement. And let’s not forget that, in the context of cricket officiating,
the human eye is but an imperfect ball-tracking device.

Secondly, the absolutist belief that the umpire’s verdict is
final is symptomatic of what might, in a manner of speaking, be called a
‘theological attitude’. Around the time of the launch of DRS in 2009, Ian
Chappell wrote that the unquestioned acceptance of the umpire’s decision was
the foundation of the game (certainly, his compatriot, Simon Taufel, a
five-time winner of the ICC’s Umpire of the Year award, is cutting an
increasingly crestfallen figure as more of his decisions are overturned). But
surely the point is the one lucidly made by the late Peter Roebuck, that
“nothing is more calculated to reduce authority than allowing obviously
erroneous judgement to stand”. Ultimately, Chappell’s is an absurd stance, tantamount
to saying he would rather have ‘honest mistakes’ than greater justice – truly,
it belongs in Lewis Carroll. What sort of judicial system deprives its accused
of the right of appeal if there is further evidence to be considered? Well, one
that confines authority to the will of an sacred and/or incontestable individual,
like the absolutist monarchies or totalitarian dictatorships. Such a blind
insistence on the sanctity of the Umpire’s thunderbolt judgement disingenuously
denies a basic human obstinacy on the part of the principles of justice, the
unwillingness of those less fatalistic souls simply to acquiesce in a culture
of (eminently avoidable) human errors that could prove decisive, could radically
alter your career, your life. Everything in our instincts protests.

umpires and the judgement from on high

One obvious compromise, at least on the face of things,
would be to allow the umpires themselves to refer upstairs any decision they wish to, which shows that Authority
per se is not being undermined,
only that the means for arriving at decisions is being broadened. However, the
likely consequences of this move would be that umpires would tend – much as happens
with line decisions – to refer all
decisions in which there was even a scintilla of doubt (which, given the
fallibility of humans’ perceptual apparatus, would be many). If a Darwinian
perspective views behaviour as fundamentally the striving after an advantage, there
is simply nothing for an official to gain, and everything to lose, by making
decisions based on fallible sensory evidence alone. Umpires wrongly failing to
refer decisions would soon be ‘rested’. Moreover, this approach would do little
to foster a culture of self-policing and restraint – for many observe that the
players being invested in the decision-making has helped engender a more
cordial, less suspicious atmosphere – since players would be ‘incentivized’ to
appeal for everything, duly preying on the umpire’s doubts.

DRS = advantage India?

Clearly, the successful implementation of DRS – and the
assent of the game’s stakeholders thereto – requires an adequate number of
cameras shooting at an adequate number of frames-per-second to ensure the
ball-tracking technology functions as it should, which itself raises serious cost
issues that the ICC’s general cricket manager, Dave Richardson, recently said
he expected would be factored into broadcasting tenders. There are also
improvements to be made to Hot Spot – Vaseline might be best avoided if we are
to lubricate the wheels of justice – whilst DRS needs to be universally applied
for the much trumpeted Test Championship to have any credibility. Failing this,
players with the newly acquired habits and behaviours that DRS inculcates in
nations that have embraced it will face deep culture shock when they visit
other, sceptical lands such as India – with all the potential for
incomprehension, rancour and rifts that one already gets in other walks of life
when moving between traditional and modern forms of authority, or vice versa.

Leaving aside whether or not the Indian reservations are
legitimate, here’s the thing that no one seems to have recognised: DRS could be
precisely the mechanism that revives India’s fortunes in the Test arena.
Think about it. The single biggest change it has brought about is the number of
lbw decisions going to spinners (which in itself provides an excellent example
of the nonlinear dynamics outlined above – for the increase was evident before DRS was formally introduced,
prompted by umpires watching Hawkeye footage and seeing how many previously
rejected front-foot lbw appeals were actually going on to hit the stumps, the
technology bringing about a qualitative shift in perception). Reciprocally,
this tendency to uphold more appeals – not least because a mistaken ‘out’
decision can be rectified by review – is already affecting batsmen (as would a
predator’s behaviour its potential prey), bringing about modifications in
previously well-honed and well-adapted techniques (not to mention in tactics
and perhaps even selection). One such batsman, Kevin Pietersen, even ascribes
this qualitative change to a precise moment: when, on debut in Nagpur in 2006, Monty Panesar snared Sachin
Tendulkar lbw on the front foot.

At any rate, in the recently concluded series between Pakistan and England, 43 out of 110 wickets fell
to lbws, 32 of those to spinners (in part attributable to the characteristics
of the pitches). And India
is, of course, the land of producing
spinners. Anil Kumble’s 619 wickets and Harbajhan’s 406 are not negligible
hauls (although one wonders how many more victims the former, particularly, would
have snared under DRS) and the national side are very rarely without top-class
twirlers and tweakers – one only need mention the great quartet from the 1970s:
Erapalli Prasanna, Bishan Bedi, Bhagwath Chandrasekhar and Srinivas
Venkataraghavan. It should be borne in mind that it is not a simple case of
bowling straight at 60mph, and that you still need to deceive the batsman in
flight and off the pitch, but it would seem that India is a country well equipped to
prosper from DRS.

Not only is India the fecund (crumbling) soil from which
sprout many an autochthonous twirler, it is also the land in which batsmen grow
up most adept at playing spin – with
the bat, not the pad. And therein lies the point: there is no need for any
high-mindedness or some noble gesture ‘for the good of the game’ for India
to U-turn and adopt the DRS. It can be done on the entirely pragmatic grounds
of it increasing their potency and gaining them an advantage: survivalist logic,
if you will. Sure, India
will still have to go to South Africa,
Australia and England, and
will need to develop players suited for those challenges, but we shouldn’t be
too hasty to draw conclusions about their current playing strength from recent
travails on the road.

DRS: an opportunity in the 'space of possibilties' for India's Test fortunes

DRS, T20 and feedback
in a competitive milieu

As we said at the outset, cricket administration is, by and
large, defensive and wary of novelty. India is not the sole country where
an anti-modern outlook can be found (to anticipate a possible rebuke, please
note that anti-modern is a strictly
literal and value-free description). A good many celebrated Australian voices share
this view of DRS, including Chappell and several other ex-players, as well as
such esteemed writers as Gideon Haigh and Greg Baum, the latter even arguing
recently in The Age that “DRS has
come to be accepted as infallible… For players, to walk is no longer an ethical
issue.” No longer! This can only be
nostalgia. When survival (I mean livelihood, rather than innings) is at stake,
players – people – tend to try and get away with things. The only modern player
to make a virtue of walking was Adam Gilchrist and he was about as secure of
his place in the team as is TableMountain on the Cape.

Yet for every skeptical Baum asserting that “cricket needs to wean itself off an almost infantile dependence”, there is an Osman Samiuddin who understands the economic pressures and political kowtowing underpinning the refusal to push for the compulsory adoption of DRS: “The problem is the way [the BCCI] have bullied member
boards behind the scenes – at the risk of damaging lucrative bilateral ties –
into making DRS implementation non-mandatory. And in that, the bullied are as
culpable for allowing it to happen. It is not up to that much-imagined but
non-existent, independent decision-making supra-ICC body to enforce DRS. It is
up to individual member boards.”

Dave Richardson has seen the future

Now, it is perhaps naïve, or romantic even, to suppose that
the primary goal of an individual national board – much less the profit-monitoring
businessfolk that own IPL franchises – would be the holistic husbandry of the
game for the benefit of all its stakeholders. That would be the ICC’s role.
Even so, while India’s
reasons for embracing T20 are transparent enough from an evolutionary
standpoint, but the logic for eschewing DRS remains opaque indeed, and seems to
be swimming against the tide of history. In the prophetic words of Richardson: “technology ishere to stay. If the broadcasters are going to continue to use it, we have touse it”. The ostrich’s head must eventually come out from the sand.

Whatever their motivations for rejecting DRS and yet
simultaneously backing the T20 form (particularly its ‘domestic’ competition), together
it amounts to a double abandonment of the common sphere of Test cricket and a
blow, moreover, for the notion of the collective health of the game. It is
difficult to shake off the feeling that the BCCI and the IPL is now – perhaps semi-consciously
– leading a sea change, an evolutionary line that will eventuate in the oft-predicted
slow diminishment of the Test format in the eyes of players increasingly drawn
to the bright lights of T20. And it is here that the parallelism between
natural and cultural evolution – the same abstract dynamics, albeit on a vastly
different time scale – is instructive. Given that, in the shared ‘adaptive
landscape’ of players and other national boards alike, the BCCI’s economic
power is both a resource and a constraint, we can see the modern cricketer’s rationale
increasingly taking shape along the lines of: it’s a short career – therefore,
short game, big money, no brainer. (And the likes of Keiron Pollard have shown
that large T20 contracts do not depend on status carried over from the Test
arena.) If that is the case – and
that remains a big if – then Test
cricket, sustained on prestige alone, becomes increasingly archaic and prey to
extinction.

Pollard (L) and Gayle: Twenty20 freelancers

Fear often prevents us from peering into the hurly-burly of
a historical moment and taking the adaptive steps that must be taken. But the open
present and its ‘space of possibility’ is as much a question of opportunity as risk.
DRS presents the chance, in a thoroughly competitive milieu (although, in
cricket the stakes are low compared to, say, football with its threat of
relegation; but cricket-as-a-whole’s environment is hugely competitive), to
maximise the efficacy of their predominant cricketing cultural traits – playing
spin, bowling spin – in order to gain an advantage. However, so too, in a more
fundamental way, does turning their back on Test cricket and shoring up their hold
over T20, while drip-feeding that format into the grass roots, cementing those
traits in the techniques and imaginations of new generations of cricketers.
After all, if you are the apex predator in a particularly resource-abundant and
seemingly stable environment, why seek to turn back the clock and relinquish
control? Why not simply push ahead, reinforce your dominance, rip the meat from
the skeleton of Test cricket and hoover up your competitors’ greatest assets?
Or would the cricket community and the BCCI powerbrokers be well served
remembering that, no matter how dominant a predator, it still needs some prey on
which to feed?

Friday, 9 March 2012

A few weeks ago now, I
wrote a heartfelt valediction for the impressive and avuncular Mohsin Khan,
removed from office by the PCB on account of him not holding coaching certificates –
ostensibly, at least – and replaced with
the Colombo-born Australian, Dav Whatmore, thus now starting out with his third Asian
nation.

My honorific team – A Broth
of Khans– didn’t feature the obvious choices. There was no Younus
Khan, no Majid Khan, no Amjad Khan and, most controversially, no Imran Khan (nor
Imraan Khan, for that matter). Instead, I opted for the mercurial talents – and
idiosyncratic orthography – of, among others, Chaka, Shere, James, Oliver,
Genghis and Jahangir.

I did speculate as to who
they might play, these Khans. Smiths would be the obvious choice – craftsmen
against rulers – or Patels, perhaps. Then it occurred to me: Cooks.

Too Many Cooks Spoil Broth of Khans – an unimprovable headline!

Or, if the game went the
other way: Khan Cook, Won’t Cook
(although I’m not entirely sure that makes sense).

England and Essex opener,
Woody (Toy Story) lookalike, regular
scorer of Daddy hundreds and, all things being equal, well on his way to
monumental Test stats that may well see him pass 50 Test hundreds – perhaps
more than wee Mr T.

One
thing is for certain: he can definitely stand the heat, not even breaking
sweat, so has no need to vacate the kitchen.

02: Jimmy Cook

Every bit as prolific as
his opening partner, SJ Cook was one of the game’s lost greats, sadly marginalized
by apartheid. After playing unrecognised international cricket for SA Breweries
and domestically for Transvaal, he finished with 3 prolific seasons at Somerset (amassing the small matter of 7500 runs and 28
hundreds) and squeezed in 3 post-readmission Tests in India.

03: Geoff Cook

Head coach of Durham and steady opening
bat for Northants. Benefited from one of the aforementioned Rebel Tours to
South Africa, playing 7 Tests across which he averaged just 15 with a couple of
half-centuries. He has been hugely successful as a coach and Director of
Cricket in his native Durham as they won
back-to-back CountyChampionships in 2009 and
2010.

04: Stephen Cook

Son of Jimmy and holder of
the record first-class score in South African domestic cricket: a colossal innings
of 390 (54 fours, 638 balls) made in October 2009 for Lions in East London
against an attack containing Makhaya Ntini, Lonwabo Tsotsobe, Juan Theron and Johan
Botha.

05: Frederick Cook

Born in Java, died in
Gallipoli in 1915 aged 45, and between times turned out in a Test match for South Africa in Port
Elizabeth against England.

06: Tommy Cook

One of Cricinfo’s Cult Cricketers
for Sussex, he scored 20,000 runs in his 460 games between 1922-37, with 32 hundreds
and a best of 278, which wasn’t quite good enough to earn an international cap.
He also played football for Brighton and Hove
Albion between the World Wars and was a hero in both: in the First as a naval
officer and the Second as part of the South African air force.

07: Jeff Cook

Part-Aboriginal
Sydneysider Jeff Cook came to England
to play club cricket for Caverswall in Staffordshire in 1992 and was
subsequently picked up by Northants, a good player of pace and handy
medium-pacer whose problems against spin meant he didn’t quite fulfil his
potential, averaging only 29.35.

08: Fraser Cooke (wk)

Nine games for CambridgeUniversity. Surname Cook. Keeper. Gets
in.

09: Simon Cook

The 40-year-old ex-New South Wales and Victoria
seamer played two Tests for Australia
in 1997, taking 7 wickets at 20 apiece against New
Zealand as replacement for Glenn McGrath, including 5/39
in debut in Perth,
before being discarded. That he failed to bag 100 first-class wickets indicates
what a rare day in the sun that was (not literally, obviously, as it’s fairly
sunny in that part of the world).

10: Simon Cook

The ex-Middlesex and currently
Kent workhorse seamer from Oxfordshire (à la Jack Brooks) with 341 career wickets
at 32 has the all-too-predictable nickname Chef and is famous in the
blogosphere – as of right now – for looking a little bit
like Praveen
Kumar.

11: Nick Cook

A steady roller of a
left-arm spinner who benefitted from a lack of real quality in the spin
department in England in the early 1980s to play 15 Tests, starting
spectacularly well with 32 wickets in 4 games at 17.3, finishing with 52 at 32.
He may also have bore a vague resemblance to Henri Leconte– with no discernible ass and a
penchant for physical comedy– but that could be my memory playing tricks.
Now an umpire.

-------

However, this was only the
second string. We felt that more versatility is needed, so here is THE REAL COOK XI (with the match
against the Khans perhaps held in the Cook Islands).

01: NORMAN COOK [aka FATBOY SLIM]

Variously known as
Pizzaman, Mighty Dub Katz and Freakpower to members of the pseudo-dance music
community (i.e. beats for Indie kids on the Amyl Nitrate), a former member of
The Housemartins (before they became The Beautiful South) and creator of the ‘Guns of Brixton’-plagiarising
Number 1 hit for Beats International, he has shown he’s prepared to stoop to
anything to be at number 1, so let’s let him grab his Weapon of
Choice and take strike.

02: ROBIN COOK

Leftie who is not
comfortable with spin, so best off on the front bench, as it were. Indeed, as
Foreign Secretary he was opposed to unnecessary attacks (on Iraq) and thus probably
well suited to an old style opener role. Robin’s cricketing career was stalked
by controversy, though, inasmuch as there were persistent, widespread, pre-DRS
doubts over his demise.

03: KATHY COOK

Came out at ‘first drop’
in the 4 x 400m, was a winner of several bronzes, and no doubt bore other tenuous
biographical facts that would support the idea of one of GB’s greatest
sprinters batting at number 3.

04: SAM COOKE

Not the somewhat buxom
blonde tit-flasher
that a Google image search reveals, but the soul singer who died tragically
prematurely, aged just 33 (like one or two other figures from history),
shot dead in a motel. Cooke is most famous to me for his rendition of
‘Wonderful World’ for the Levi’s 501 advert of 1986, which made it to number 1.
In a cricket context, 501 is of course associated with Brian Charles, making
Sam a born number 4.

05: CAPTAIN JAMES COOK (c)

Alastair Cook was born on
Christmas Day, the day on which, coincidentally, James Cook found,
coincidentally, Christmas Island – all his Christmases coming at once – on the
way to Cook Islands (and they say no man is an
island). As with his successor and his 766-run Ashes, the intrepid Yorkshireman
stamped his mark on the land Down Under (a journey planned in 1766, almost Lincoln/JFK spookily), while his journals were as eagerly
read as those of Steve Waugh 230 years later. To rumours that he’s only picked
for his leadership, I say: who else will get the best out of…

06: SUE COOK

The sometime obnoxious chain-smoking
interlocutor of Alan Partridge (who famously pulled out of the
simulacrum of his discontinued talkshow held at the Travel Tavern) was in fact the
thoroughly ‘nice’ presenter of Crimewatch.
All-rounder Sue may be middle of the team, but she’s not middle-of-the-road, as proven
by her spicy debut novel On Dangerous
Ground, based on the abandoned Jamaica Test of 1998.

07: TIM COOK (wk)

If you’re the chosen
successor of Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple, it’s to be assumed you’re considered a
safe pair of hands. Never on the field without iPads, Tim is a core member of
the team.

08: JAMIE COOK

In another life, the
Arctic Monkey might well have opened the bowling for Yorkshire
– another life in which he liked cricket, that is. Nevertheless, the guitarist is
definite new ball material. Happy taking the lead, although he will also leave the
chat to the rest of the attack, his anticipation has a habit to set you up ....for music – largely of the chin variety. As a result, there’s usually a little bit of trouble with
t’oppo, often resulting in a ruckus, regardless of what’s
gone before. He is a particularly devastating player in day/night games, by all
accounts: they say he changes when the sun goes down…

09: THOMAS COOK

Spinner who travels well,
lots of flight. Has been known to go the journey but enough experience to
handle any situation. Provides insurance for batting collapse, too.

10: PETER COOK

We all know that, after
his playing days were over, he became a commentator, most famously on the
famous Good vs Evil
cricket match (which caused a psychotic episode giving rise to his Cloughian football
manager alter ego, Alan
Latchley). However, this very steady seamer was also a top player, and very
candid about the tour on which his sharp and incisive double act with Dud was
spanked, turning the episode into a frank fly-on-the-wall documentary, Derek and Clive Get the Horn. He also
satirised his lack of batting prowess in ‘One Leg (Too Few)’.

11: ROGER COOK

The burly, in-your-face
Kiwi is a courageous new ball partner for Jamie Cook. Probing relentlessly, not
afraid of getting hit, difficult to knock out of his stride: this is the
character you need when backs are against the wall.

12th Man: CHARLIE COOKE

The former Chelsea winger, who set
up the equaliser in the infamous 1970 FA Cup Final replay, just misses out on
selection because of a tendency to bowl wides – well, he puts far too many
crosses in the box. Then again, he is a wide man.